Hutch
My responses (Guest2) were directed at the statements made by Guest1:
"I truly believe that the manual, human-based, and slow tasks of many of the incident and problem management tasks will be completely computer automated - including the actually root cause analysis"

Hi Everyone, just adding my two cents worth here. Big Al, ITIL is a framework and each process is a set of best practices that you should tailor to your organization based on its industry, culture, process maturity and business goals. To give you an example, the organization I work for is privately held. If the one computer was a facility person then likely we would manage it with incidents and that would be the end of it. ONLY if the same person on the same computer called in a number of times a problem ticket be raised. Now take the same situation and this tiem the person is the owner, a problem ticket would have been opened on the first incident and likely an RFC raised to replace the system if it happened a second time. Now this is extreme and my point is this, ITIL has nothing to do with "when" you do something, it tells you how to do it when you need to do it.